Citing the need to focus Project 2000 on redesigning organizational structures and business processes, Senior Vice President Frederick A. Rogers and Provost Don M. Randel have announced the appointment of Jack Freeman as executive director of Project 2000.
Freeman formerly was executive vice president at Temple University and at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1994-95 he led a University of Pennsylvania's administrative restructuring initiative as acting executive vice president. Freeman earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Baylor University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, and he served as assistant professor of political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy and as professor of higher education at the University of Pittsburgh.
Freeman will assume overall responsibility for project management, coordination and resource management for Project 2000, the goal of which is to improve administrative services and reduce administrative costs through business process redesign and implementation of new administrative software systems from PeopleSoft Inc. President Hunter Rawlings announced Project 2000 in March of 1996, calling it the key initiative in achieving one of Cornell's 1996-97 strategic goals, increased administrative efficiency.
"Jack Freeman brings focus, process, discipline, relevant experience, and an understanding of the academic culture," Randel said, noting that the new project director has significant experience in leading a "transformational project."
"I am looking forward to working with a dedicated group of team leaders to ensure that process redesign and introduction of new technology are integrated across the five key areas," Freeman said. He already has met with leaders of teams in the five key areas that Project 2000 addresses: human resources and payroll, student administration, financial operations, administration of sponsored programs and alumni affairs and development.
Significant progress has occurred in the functional areas addressed by Project 2000, said Rogers. Human Resource specialists from across campus have participated in sessions describing the workings of the PeopleSoft Human Resource Management system and comparing processes used in key areas.
"A spectacular amount of information came from the 'fit-and-gap' sessions we held," said Glenn Beardsley, who, with Lyman Flahive, leads the HR/Payroll team. "People can probably never understand how much they helped us, but we've been able to move into prototyping a new system earlier than we'd planned because we gathered so much information in those six weeks."
In another area, Cornell's Student Information System project team recently hosted six other schools working with PeopleSoft in developing the new student administration system from PeopleSoft. David S. Yeh, leader of the student project team, said he is pleased with progress on the development efforts and PeopleSoft's responsiveness to needs of the universities involved.
Helen Mohrmann, director of administrative systems and distributed technologies, noted that Project 2000's effort to "break the big red tape" is already getting a boost from a data warehousing initiative. Data warehouses store data centrally and make that data accessible to departments as well as to the central administration.
Mohrmann relates the data warehouse initiative to Project 2000's strategy of providing better access, integrity and utility of data, and says experience with data warehouses so far "really starts to prove that we can have common sources of data."
The Project 2000 web pages at http://www.cornell.edu/p2k are a good source of detailed information about Project 2000.